"Your Time Starts Now.": Taskmaster-esque in class activities for Instrumental Lectures

Alexander D. Jacobs

University of Florida

Students’ engagement and learning through flipped classrooms has shown to help students better understand material and retain it for future classes and beyond. However, in class activities can be a challenge to create. Here, in class activities based on the British comedy show “Taskmaster” will be discussed.

“Taskmaster” is a show that pits 5 comedians against each other, performing tasks that range from relatively benign and routine, to absurd and outlandish. The idea is to take this concept and apply it to learning activities in the classroom, over the course of the semester. A classroom of 40 senior analytical students were broken into 5 teams of 8. During every learning module, there was at least 1 day devoted to a “Taskmaster” day. There would be one prize task and one in class task. The prize tasks have the groups bring in 1 object representing a “best of” category. The in person task is revealed and be related to the subject of the current learning module, i.e. spectroscopy, separations, mass spectrometry, etc. The teams would then have a certain amount of time to complete the task and then present it by the end of the class period. For both types of tasks, teams would be awarded points (1-5) and by the end of the semester, the team with the most points wins.

Overall, there were mixed results. Some of the tasks worked extremely well, even in a large classroom setting. Others had struggles and concepts were not well conveyed. This talk will cover the aspects that worked, with examples from the classroom, as well as those that did not. In addition, ideas from lessons learned will also be discussed for a more successful implementation in the future.

Thank you.